Bill Reynolds: No one wants to see this NFL game

Saturday

Nov 9, 2013 at 6:56 PM

The National Football League is the most popular sports league in the country. It’s also a window into American culture. And it’s not always a pretty picture we see. So when it is all over the news regarding...

The National Football League is the most popular sports league in the country.

It’s also a window into American culture.

And it’s not always a pretty picture we see.

So when it is all over the news regarding the bullying of second-year player Jonathan Martin by veteran Richie Incognito, it is more than just a problem for the Miami Dolphins. It’s also a problem for the NFL.

At the most obvious level, it’s just the latest example that no one wanting to see the inner-workings of anything. We love football. We love the NFL. And if both come with a certain asterisk, hopefully we can ignore that and focus on the action on the field.

But why should we be surprised when people who play a violent game and spend much of their time in a violent culture do violent things?

The number of NFL players who get arrested for violent acts is the part of the game that doesn’t make the NFL promo packages, the crazy cousin in the family everyone’s always trying to ignore.

There have been 31 arrests since last season’s Super Bowl, a laundry list from public drunkenness to Aaron Hernandez’s murder charge. According to the Business Insider website, 395 players have been arrested since Roger Goodell became the commissioner in 2006.

At another level, just as obvious but a lot more accepted, is the sexism that’s as endemic to the NFL as blitz packages. From the cheerleaders, to many of the sideline TV reporters, to Carrie Underwood’s performance leading into “Sunday Night Football,” to Beyonce’s halftime show at last year’s Super Bowl, the selling of female pulchritude is seemingly as much a part of the NFL as the endless TV commercials.

Then again, we love spectacle, and there might be no greater spectacle in sport than game day in the NFL.

And on game day, complete with hyperbolic broadcasters and all the bigness that surrounds the NFL, we all buy in. Why not? We love great theater, and the NFL is great theater.

Then there is the concept of “in the room,” the new sports euphemism for the locker room, the clubhouse, or whatever else it used to be called. The theory is that the room is its own little universe, its own world, with its own rules, its own culture if you will.

Complete with its subtext.

It’s one that says this is our room, and if we decide to put rookies through hazing, that’s our own business. Just like if we want to toss around the “n” word in our room, that’s our business, too.

The room rules.

You hear variations of this in sports these days, at many levels. You hear about the coach who lost his job because he “lost the room.” You hear about the player who had to get traded because he “didn’t fit in the room.”

The larger point is that there often is the potential for disconnect here. So when you see a video of Incognito on the Internet raging in some bar with his shirt off, totally out of control, never mind inappropriate, you realize that he’s playing by different rules, no matter how much his teammates seem to like him.

Nor does it come by as any great surprise that his Dolphin teammates have rallied around him, at the expense of Martin. Incognito, who is white, helped them win. Martin, who is biracial, didn’t. Incognito was one of the guys, called “honorary,” by one of the former Miami players who is black. Martin, whose parents went to Harvard, did not help them win and was not considered one of the guys.

Or as Jason Whitlock, a columnist for Fox Sports, who is black, wrote, “Welcome to Incarceration Nation, where the mindset of the Miami Dolphins’ locker room mirrors the mentality of a maximum-security prison yard.”

So what’s going on here?

At some level, anyway, it’s the reaffirmation NFL players are operating by different rules. At another, it’s one more example of how removed from much of society they are.

At still another, it’s just the latest example of how out of control rookie hazing has become. Where in more innocent times it was maybe some rookie having to stand up and sing his college’s alma mater while everyone made fun of him, now it seems both more hard-edged and never-ending.

Certainly it was in Martin’s case.

For, ultimately, this was not about hazing.

This was about bullying.

We expect to see bullying in middle schools. It’s long been an unfortunate part of the terrain. We don’t expect to see it in the NFL. Were Incognito’s teammates complicit in this? Did the coaches know? These are the unanswered questions.

They are the not the only ones.

Just don’t expect a whole lot of answers.

That, too, is the NFL, where for the most part the players are taught to avoid the media as if they’re blitzing linebackers come to take their paychecks. Much of their time is spent within the glorified bunkers that are their practice facilities. They are seen virtually only on game day, when they emerge to play a very violent game in a very public setting.